numb3r_5ev3n (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
numb3r_5ev3n) wrote2024-02-03 05:44 pm
numb3r_5ev3n) wrote2024-02-03 05:44 pm
Moonblood and Magick (TW: discussion of blood consumption.) First Draft.
OK, so here's where I finally talk about the group I was involved with when I was in High School, the similarities between it and Nicholas de Vere's "Dragon Court" philosophy - and how it differed.
I've been procrastinating about writing this, actually - because I don't have the permission of anyone else who was involved at the time. And because it was literally thirty years ago, and I'm worried about things getting distorted or maybe overly romanticized through thirty years of hindsight.
There were only ever four of us at any given time (like the film The Craft) and generally less than that - because our ringleader, who I'll can "Ven," had a very controlling and abusive father who jealously policed her friends and her extracurricular activities, and it was rare that the four of us were all able to meet up together outside of school. I can probably count the times this happened on both hands with several fingers left over. But the rest of us spent as much time together as humanly possible.
And it wasn't a situation where we formed a group balanced by the Elements, either - we were three Waters and an Earth. Which may have helped contribute to some of what took place that year (roughly a nine-month period between 1993 and 1994. October 1993 through May or June 1994.)
Here's the thing. Previously, I talked about Magic(k) and the idea that many traditions have adopted romanticized mythologies to explain their history and philosophy which don't hold up to academic or historical scrutiny. In previous writings on this subject, I mentioned the belief that a lot of practitioners have come to: mainly that the "lore" or "mythology" is irrelevant just so long as the Magic works or the rituals work.
Those who are coming to this article after having read my other ones, and who are also familiar with Nicholas de Vere's writings as well, may be asking: "What rituals? The only ritual Nicholas de Vere talked about at all was a variation on the Middle Pillar Exercise, substituting Sumerian God Names for Hebrew ones. Everything else was all just about Moonblood."
And the Moonblood angle is one that I feel has gotten lost - or intentionally glossed over - in people's seeming overwhelming desire to prove their descent from the "Grail" or "Dragon" bloodlines, due mostly to the "squick factor."
Because when he isn't dragging New Agers and Wiccans or the Church, Nicholas de Vere desperately wants us to know just awesome it is to drink the monthly or "Moon" blood of Dragon Priestesses, directly from the source - and the entheogenic and spiritual benefits it's supposed to have on people of the proper genetic descent.
As much as he expounds upon this, you would think it was a well-known aspect of Nicholas de Vere's philosophy. But we used to get visitors to the 2001-2006 era Dragon Court dot org website who had no idea about this aspect of it at all. And in the words of one forum member when she finally read about it, "what I just read is more than I ever wanted to know about that."
People who were aware of the "Moonblood" angle seemed more interested in Laurence Gardner's theory that "white powder gold" had eventually been employed by Ancient Egyptians as a substitute. Mainly because the idea of that was a lot more palatable (and maybe more socially acceptable) than moonblood.
(Sort of related: ‘Do not eat the cake of light!’ Attending Aleister Crowley’s Gnostic Mass")
The thing is - as far as I was aware - this wasn't what the group I was involved with in high school were doing at all. Yes, you can make whatever assumptions you want about four queer teen girls, but there it is. There were some dropped hints and discussions of alchemical euphemisms and all that. But the thing is - we already there mentally where drinking the Moonblood was supposed to have gotten us.
The "Mythology Story" of our group was hauntingly similar to Nicholas de Vere's story of the Nephilim and the Elves, and the "Thousand-Year Elven Holocaust." So much so that it immediately grabbed me when I read it years later.
But we were more into energy-working, "Lightworking," but also what would come to be called "Fiction-Suiting," and what is commonly referred to today on TikTok and other places as "Reality-Shifting."
Because there were millions of realities out there, according to our beliefs - and this one wasn't even one of the important ones, except where it intersected with others. So why worry about our grades, or our futures in this reality, or what college we were going to go to, or what jobs we wanted to get? (As if!)
If our group had a motto, it was "everything is real." If you can imagine it, or if someone else has imagined it, then it exists somewhere in the multiverse.
Some of this was down to the fact that at least two of us in the group were Multiples with Outsourced Alters from fictional works. But some of it was just the kind of maladaptive and escapist coping strategies that traumatized, isolated teens tend to develop.
But I think some of it also may have been a holdover from the collective societal anxiety everyone had been mired in regarding the cold war and possible nuclear annihilation. And then it didn't happen. And we were still here, with no long term goals or plans or even dreams - nothing that involved anything resembling a "career path," anyway. We'd seen what decades of having "careers" had done to our parents. We didn't want any part of that. To quote the meme, we didn't dream of labor.
And this is where we get to the part where the "Chaos Magick Surge" which permeated so much of the 1990s was a huge influence. This is where you get to the stories of people making Egregores and Tulpas based on comic book characters, and the anecdotes about Chaos Magicians successfully invoking Bugs Bunny as a Godform and things like that. As Nicholas de Vere himself might say - "BINGO."
And I think a lot of people who have moved in Esoteric or Weird Circles might have encountered the other side of this - people who claim they met/killed/had sex with/married mythological figures, gods or goddesses or fictional characters on The Astral Plane, etc. (The collective unconscious does not know the difference.)
So, Reality Shifting isn't even a new concept. It probably wasn't a new concept even when we were doing it in 1993 and 1994. There have probably been several iterations of small groups of kids like we were then, going back a long, long time. The Internet just gave it a name and made the General Public aware of its existence. But we were also getting into "real Magic" or Magick, via Donald Michael Craig's book Modern Magick: Eleven Lessons In The High Magickal Arts. I also picked up Silver Ravenwolf's To Ride A Silver Brookmstick that year.
I had come to this situation already aware of some basic mysteries - mainly that "magic" works via communication with the Collective Unconscious and the Subconscious Mind, and how this affects Consensus Reality. And I already had an instinctive grasp of what I called "Chaos Magic" - and what I later learned was actually called "Chaos Magick" by others.
The thing is, having a so-called "instinctive grasp" of anything will only get you so far without proper study and practice. And sometimes it just gets you into trouble. Which is what happened to us.
I'd spent that whole summer in 1993 before the school term hammering out what my thoughts were about "Life, The Universe, and Everything," (when I wasn't reading Michael Moorcock's Elric saga or playing Dungeons and Dragons.) I'd attempted to expand my mind without the use of drugs (because we were the D.A.R.E generation, and because I'd had stories from Boomer-age hippie acquaintances about the dangers of Bad Trips.)
It started with hangouts at each others' houses, a get-together to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas in the theater, a slumber party over Halloween, and repeated viewings of Buckaroo Banzai: Across The Eighth Dimension. It ended in disaster. It was basically like every mental issue or disorder or trigger we had sort of all went off at once.
I had a breakdown. And by the time I came back out of it, I found myself apparently being held accountable for stuff another incarnation of myself had apparently done in another reality that I had no memory of - because it wasn't actually me, and because it never really happened - in this reality, that reality, or any other.
(Basically: I was told that one of the other group members had peeked into a reality where the X Men from Marvel Comics existed, and that I was incarnated there as Mister Sinister - and therefore, responsible for everything Mister Sinister had done. For this crime, I was ejected from the group an ostracized by my friends.
Or at least, this was the excuse I was given. But in hindsight, I'm kind of disappointed that I didn't just decide to run with that, and play "Mister Sinister" to the goddamn hilt. If i was being accused of being Mister
Sinister, then I should have become the most dastardly Mister Sinister I could have been. Which probably would have come off like my idea of "Anthony Hopkins as Mister Sinister," but whatever. This feels like a missed opportunity.
What actually happened was, I'd called out some behavior within the group that had seemed a bit off - something that in hindsight I was very right to call out. And I was being shunned and excluded from the group because of it. And basically, the group fell apart after that.
To outsiders, the implosion of our group probably just looked like the usual teen drama - because of course, the relevant bits were all happening in other realities or The Astral Plane. To us, it was Multidimensional Magickal Warfare. To everyone else, it was a group of teen girls screaming at each other in the High School commons area.
But when you are first getting into Magickal practice and you aren't prepared for some of the things that can happen to you spiritually and psychologically, especially when you're "crossing the streams" of reality and imagination in the ways that we were, "Spiritual Psychosis" (or "Mad Bastard Syndrome") is a very possible outcome (if not inevitable.)
Writers like Lyam Thomas Chrisopher talk about how "Ego Expansion" can occur after certain esoteric thresholds have been crossed. Anyone who has seen the movie The Craft has seen a fictionalized example of what Ego Expansion and Spiritual Psychosis looks like, in the character of Nancy Downs (played by Fairuza Balk.)
That movie came out about a year and a half after our group had already imploded. And I didn't see it for years because I just knew it would be triggering with how close the events were to what I'd just been through. But for me there was no triumphant happy ending. Just the sudden, shocking scorn and absence of the people I'd come to consider my best friends.
We weren't prepared for the things we were dealing with. The warnings in books like Donald Michael Kraig's Modern Magick did not prepare us for what happened - because like everyone else who gets themselves into the same kind of mess, we naively thought we could handle it. And not to put words in his mouth, but Donald Michael Kraig likely would have warned us not to mix something like Reality Shifting with actual Magickal practice in the first place.
But as a group of teens dealing with the longterm effects of abuse and teenage angst and an assortment of neurotic and cluster-B personality disorders, we were just not ready.
The thing is, neither was Tracy Twyman or her OLE group. Her memoir Clock Shavings reverberates with the same kind of ego-expansion and spiritual psychosis that we had been afflicted with.
There's a phrase which has been employed by Robert Anton Wilson and Antero Alli to describe this kind of situation - "The Chapel Perilous." For me, it's the point in the dead center of the intersection between spiritual psychosis and ego expansion. You either navigate your way through it, are helped through it, or you're stuck there for the rest of your life. However long or forshortened that ends up being.
It seems to me that the "Dragon Court Current" attracts people who are vulnerable to this kind of ego expansion/spiritual psychosis like flies to a bug zapper. Maybe people who are already halfway there. It attracts people who want to be The King or The Queen or The Grand Master. People who want a title. People who want deference. People who want to be told they are already the best, the master, the sovereign, superior to everyone else.
There's a pathology that people can get into when life keeps knocking them in the dirt. Maybe there's some neurodivergence going on there, maybe they just don't fit in with "the normies" or "the mundanes" or "the sheeple" or whatever. When it seems like society keeps reminding you of every way you don't fit in and everything you just can't seem to do right, there's a temptation to seek something out that tells you that you're secretly better than everyone who has been critical of you - that you've actually been doing everything right all along, that it's everyone else who needs to get with the program. Your program.
And actually, I didn't want any of that. I just wanted my friends back. I just wanted everything back the way it was before it all fell apart - and for things to progress from that point as if the fallout had never occurred. And if that wasn't possible, (and it just wasn't at that point) I wanted something that could replace that.
I had wanted the Dragon Court to replace that.
Because when you are dealing with stuff like Reality-Shifting and Fiction-Suiting with a bunch of other people, you kind of get to a place where you've assumed an identity and a self-image (dare I say "residual self-image") that only that group is aware of and familiar with. To my friends, I was an Elven Bard and Extradimensional Adventurer. To everyone else, I was a schlubby goth teen with weird friends, an ever-expanding renfaire wardrobe, and a tabletop RPG fixation.
And without the group, I couldn't be that anymore. I couldn't be me anymore. At least, that was what I thought for a long time.
So, back on the subject of Nicholas de Vere and the Dragon Court - what were the similarities? What was it about his and Laurence Gardner's material that made me sit up and go, "oh, this part of it was real after all?"
Mainly it was the "Elves and Vampires are basically the same species, and they are the spawn of Nephilim, whose progeny were the true royalty/Priest-Kings and Queens of the ancient world, and whose human descendants were the Scythians, Druids, and Witches." And the whole part that Nicholas de Vere calls "The Thousand-Year Elven Holocaust" in which the Elves and their descendants were hunted down and suppressed by the Catholic Church.
As for the Energy-Working part of it: Nicholas de Vere touches on this briefly, but it coincided with what I'd "grasped instinctively" by the summer of 1993. Energy Spirals In, Energy Spirals Out.
And that bit about the Maid of Calais, aka the Belle Dame Sans Merci. Because that was some of the "predatory behavior" (in addition to things which were even more egregious) which I'd called out, for which I'd been shunned.
There was enough there that reading it felt like vindication. Like proof that enough of what I'd experienced was real or had at least enough of a basis in other people's belief systems that I wasn't crazy. Well, not completely.
Current Mood:
I've been procrastinating about writing this, actually - because I don't have the permission of anyone else who was involved at the time. And because it was literally thirty years ago, and I'm worried about things getting distorted or maybe overly romanticized through thirty years of hindsight.
There were only ever four of us at any given time (like the film The Craft) and generally less than that - because our ringleader, who I'll can "Ven," had a very controlling and abusive father who jealously policed her friends and her extracurricular activities, and it was rare that the four of us were all able to meet up together outside of school. I can probably count the times this happened on both hands with several fingers left over. But the rest of us spent as much time together as humanly possible.
And it wasn't a situation where we formed a group balanced by the Elements, either - we were three Waters and an Earth. Which may have helped contribute to some of what took place that year (roughly a nine-month period between 1993 and 1994. October 1993 through May or June 1994.)
Here's the thing. Previously, I talked about Magic(k) and the idea that many traditions have adopted romanticized mythologies to explain their history and philosophy which don't hold up to academic or historical scrutiny. In previous writings on this subject, I mentioned the belief that a lot of practitioners have come to: mainly that the "lore" or "mythology" is irrelevant just so long as the Magic works or the rituals work.
Those who are coming to this article after having read my other ones, and who are also familiar with Nicholas de Vere's writings as well, may be asking: "What rituals? The only ritual Nicholas de Vere talked about at all was a variation on the Middle Pillar Exercise, substituting Sumerian God Names for Hebrew ones. Everything else was all just about Moonblood."
And the Moonblood angle is one that I feel has gotten lost - or intentionally glossed over - in people's seeming overwhelming desire to prove their descent from the "Grail" or "Dragon" bloodlines, due mostly to the "squick factor."
Because when he isn't dragging New Agers and Wiccans or the Church, Nicholas de Vere desperately wants us to know just awesome it is to drink the monthly or "Moon" blood of Dragon Priestesses, directly from the source - and the entheogenic and spiritual benefits it's supposed to have on people of the proper genetic descent.
As much as he expounds upon this, you would think it was a well-known aspect of Nicholas de Vere's philosophy. But we used to get visitors to the 2001-2006 era Dragon Court dot org website who had no idea about this aspect of it at all. And in the words of one forum member when she finally read about it, "what I just read is more than I ever wanted to know about that."
People who were aware of the "Moonblood" angle seemed more interested in Laurence Gardner's theory that "white powder gold" had eventually been employed by Ancient Egyptians as a substitute. Mainly because the idea of that was a lot more palatable (and maybe more socially acceptable) than moonblood.
(Sort of related: ‘Do not eat the cake of light!’ Attending Aleister Crowley’s Gnostic Mass")
The thing is - as far as I was aware - this wasn't what the group I was involved with in high school were doing at all. Yes, you can make whatever assumptions you want about four queer teen girls, but there it is. There were some dropped hints and discussions of alchemical euphemisms and all that. But the thing is - we already there mentally where drinking the Moonblood was supposed to have gotten us.
The "Mythology Story" of our group was hauntingly similar to Nicholas de Vere's story of the Nephilim and the Elves, and the "Thousand-Year Elven Holocaust." So much so that it immediately grabbed me when I read it years later.
But we were more into energy-working, "Lightworking," but also what would come to be called "Fiction-Suiting," and what is commonly referred to today on TikTok and other places as "Reality-Shifting."
Because there were millions of realities out there, according to our beliefs - and this one wasn't even one of the important ones, except where it intersected with others. So why worry about our grades, or our futures in this reality, or what college we were going to go to, or what jobs we wanted to get? (As if!)
If our group had a motto, it was "everything is real." If you can imagine it, or if someone else has imagined it, then it exists somewhere in the multiverse.
Some of this was down to the fact that at least two of us in the group were Multiples with Outsourced Alters from fictional works. But some of it was just the kind of maladaptive and escapist coping strategies that traumatized, isolated teens tend to develop.
But I think some of it also may have been a holdover from the collective societal anxiety everyone had been mired in regarding the cold war and possible nuclear annihilation. And then it didn't happen. And we were still here, with no long term goals or plans or even dreams - nothing that involved anything resembling a "career path," anyway. We'd seen what decades of having "careers" had done to our parents. We didn't want any part of that. To quote the meme, we didn't dream of labor.
And this is where we get to the part where the "Chaos Magick Surge" which permeated so much of the 1990s was a huge influence. This is where you get to the stories of people making Egregores and Tulpas based on comic book characters, and the anecdotes about Chaos Magicians successfully invoking Bugs Bunny as a Godform and things like that. As Nicholas de Vere himself might say - "BINGO."
And I think a lot of people who have moved in Esoteric or Weird Circles might have encountered the other side of this - people who claim they met/killed/had sex with/married mythological figures, gods or goddesses or fictional characters on The Astral Plane, etc. (The collective unconscious does not know the difference.)
So, Reality Shifting isn't even a new concept. It probably wasn't a new concept even when we were doing it in 1993 and 1994. There have probably been several iterations of small groups of kids like we were then, going back a long, long time. The Internet just gave it a name and made the General Public aware of its existence. But we were also getting into "real Magic" or Magick, via Donald Michael Craig's book Modern Magick: Eleven Lessons In The High Magickal Arts. I also picked up Silver Ravenwolf's To Ride A Silver Brookmstick that year.
I had come to this situation already aware of some basic mysteries - mainly that "magic" works via communication with the Collective Unconscious and the Subconscious Mind, and how this affects Consensus Reality. And I already had an instinctive grasp of what I called "Chaos Magic" - and what I later learned was actually called "Chaos Magick" by others.
The thing is, having a so-called "instinctive grasp" of anything will only get you so far without proper study and practice. And sometimes it just gets you into trouble. Which is what happened to us.
I'd spent that whole summer in 1993 before the school term hammering out what my thoughts were about "Life, The Universe, and Everything," (when I wasn't reading Michael Moorcock's Elric saga or playing Dungeons and Dragons.) I'd attempted to expand my mind without the use of drugs (because we were the D.A.R.E generation, and because I'd had stories from Boomer-age hippie acquaintances about the dangers of Bad Trips.)
It started with hangouts at each others' houses, a get-together to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas in the theater, a slumber party over Halloween, and repeated viewings of Buckaroo Banzai: Across The Eighth Dimension. It ended in disaster. It was basically like every mental issue or disorder or trigger we had sort of all went off at once.
I had a breakdown. And by the time I came back out of it, I found myself apparently being held accountable for stuff another incarnation of myself had apparently done in another reality that I had no memory of - because it wasn't actually me, and because it never really happened - in this reality, that reality, or any other.
(Basically: I was told that one of the other group members had peeked into a reality where the X Men from Marvel Comics existed, and that I was incarnated there as Mister Sinister - and therefore, responsible for everything Mister Sinister had done. For this crime, I was ejected from the group an ostracized by my friends.
Or at least, this was the excuse I was given. But in hindsight, I'm kind of disappointed that I didn't just decide to run with that, and play "Mister Sinister" to the goddamn hilt. If i was being accused of being Mister
Sinister, then I should have become the most dastardly Mister Sinister I could have been. Which probably would have come off like my idea of "Anthony Hopkins as Mister Sinister," but whatever. This feels like a missed opportunity.
What actually happened was, I'd called out some behavior within the group that had seemed a bit off - something that in hindsight I was very right to call out. And I was being shunned and excluded from the group because of it. And basically, the group fell apart after that.
To outsiders, the implosion of our group probably just looked like the usual teen drama - because of course, the relevant bits were all happening in other realities or The Astral Plane. To us, it was Multidimensional Magickal Warfare. To everyone else, it was a group of teen girls screaming at each other in the High School commons area.
But when you are first getting into Magickal practice and you aren't prepared for some of the things that can happen to you spiritually and psychologically, especially when you're "crossing the streams" of reality and imagination in the ways that we were, "Spiritual Psychosis" (or "Mad Bastard Syndrome") is a very possible outcome (if not inevitable.)
Writers like Lyam Thomas Chrisopher talk about how "Ego Expansion" can occur after certain esoteric thresholds have been crossed. Anyone who has seen the movie The Craft has seen a fictionalized example of what Ego Expansion and Spiritual Psychosis looks like, in the character of Nancy Downs (played by Fairuza Balk.)
That movie came out about a year and a half after our group had already imploded. And I didn't see it for years because I just knew it would be triggering with how close the events were to what I'd just been through. But for me there was no triumphant happy ending. Just the sudden, shocking scorn and absence of the people I'd come to consider my best friends.
We weren't prepared for the things we were dealing with. The warnings in books like Donald Michael Kraig's Modern Magick did not prepare us for what happened - because like everyone else who gets themselves into the same kind of mess, we naively thought we could handle it. And not to put words in his mouth, but Donald Michael Kraig likely would have warned us not to mix something like Reality Shifting with actual Magickal practice in the first place.
But as a group of teens dealing with the longterm effects of abuse and teenage angst and an assortment of neurotic and cluster-B personality disorders, we were just not ready.
The thing is, neither was Tracy Twyman or her OLE group. Her memoir Clock Shavings reverberates with the same kind of ego-expansion and spiritual psychosis that we had been afflicted with.
There's a phrase which has been employed by Robert Anton Wilson and Antero Alli to describe this kind of situation - "The Chapel Perilous." For me, it's the point in the dead center of the intersection between spiritual psychosis and ego expansion. You either navigate your way through it, are helped through it, or you're stuck there for the rest of your life. However long or forshortened that ends up being.
It seems to me that the "Dragon Court Current" attracts people who are vulnerable to this kind of ego expansion/spiritual psychosis like flies to a bug zapper. Maybe people who are already halfway there. It attracts people who want to be The King or The Queen or The Grand Master. People who want a title. People who want deference. People who want to be told they are already the best, the master, the sovereign, superior to everyone else.
There's a pathology that people can get into when life keeps knocking them in the dirt. Maybe there's some neurodivergence going on there, maybe they just don't fit in with "the normies" or "the mundanes" or "the sheeple" or whatever. When it seems like society keeps reminding you of every way you don't fit in and everything you just can't seem to do right, there's a temptation to seek something out that tells you that you're secretly better than everyone who has been critical of you - that you've actually been doing everything right all along, that it's everyone else who needs to get with the program. Your program.
And actually, I didn't want any of that. I just wanted my friends back. I just wanted everything back the way it was before it all fell apart - and for things to progress from that point as if the fallout had never occurred. And if that wasn't possible, (and it just wasn't at that point) I wanted something that could replace that.
I had wanted the Dragon Court to replace that.
Because when you are dealing with stuff like Reality-Shifting and Fiction-Suiting with a bunch of other people, you kind of get to a place where you've assumed an identity and a self-image (dare I say "residual self-image") that only that group is aware of and familiar with. To my friends, I was an Elven Bard and Extradimensional Adventurer. To everyone else, I was a schlubby goth teen with weird friends, an ever-expanding renfaire wardrobe, and a tabletop RPG fixation.
And without the group, I couldn't be that anymore. I couldn't be me anymore. At least, that was what I thought for a long time.
So, back on the subject of Nicholas de Vere and the Dragon Court - what were the similarities? What was it about his and Laurence Gardner's material that made me sit up and go, "oh, this part of it was real after all?"
Mainly it was the "Elves and Vampires are basically the same species, and they are the spawn of Nephilim, whose progeny were the true royalty/Priest-Kings and Queens of the ancient world, and whose human descendants were the Scythians, Druids, and Witches." And the whole part that Nicholas de Vere calls "The Thousand-Year Elven Holocaust" in which the Elves and their descendants were hunted down and suppressed by the Catholic Church.
As for the Energy-Working part of it: Nicholas de Vere touches on this briefly, but it coincided with what I'd "grasped instinctively" by the summer of 1993. Energy Spirals In, Energy Spirals Out.
And that bit about the Maid of Calais, aka the Belle Dame Sans Merci. Because that was some of the "predatory behavior" (in addition to things which were even more egregious) which I'd called out, for which I'd been shunned.
There was enough there that reading it felt like vindication. Like proof that enough of what I'd experienced was real or had at least enough of a basis in other people's belief systems that I wasn't crazy. Well, not completely.
Current Mood:
no subject
(Though probably Moonblood would have dissuaded me from getting too heavily involved, since it would trigger one of my squicks.)
no subject
If the other’s involved are too embarrassed now to tell the truth of what they did, that’s still not on you. You still get to say, “hey, y’all let your trauma out to play and it punched me in the face - and that’s not cool.”
As to the rest: I’m sorry that happened to you, because you absolutely deserved better. I’m glad you are sounding angry and insulted on your own behalf about it, because that whole situation sounds like some bullshit.
This 100%
But we certainly do have experience with having major fall outs with groups of people because we saw problems, pointed them out, and as a result got shunned. This is the eternal whistle blower problem, but hard as it was to lose those communities, I'm grateful to have gotten out b/c our mental health probably would have declined severely if we hadn't got out.
— Sage
no subject